Client Story

A Streamlined Application Process for Students Going to College

Every year thousands of schools, colleges, universities, test and certification providers need to exchange transcript information to facilitate a smooth application process for high school, adult and international students who are seeking higher education at Ontario colleges. Data stored on multiple silos using various communication protocols created a frustrating bottleneck.

About OCAS

The Ontario College Application Service (OCAS) has been in the business of processing college applications on behalf of Ontario Colleges for almost two decades.

Prospective students and their families rely on OCAS to manage the complex transactions that require passing sensitive transcript data on to the right colleges in a timely manner, keeping the student updated throughout the process with an extremely secure, easy to use online application ​and e-commerce portal.

OCAS’s Challenges

Like a trusted concierge, OCAS gathers a student’s submission and coordinates the transferring of highly sensitive transcript information from thousands of schools, training organizations and certification bodies to the various colleges that the applicant is looking to attend.

OCAS managed this process on an aging legacy system. If a school decided to share data electronically, the exchange protocol was created as a unique solution each time. This was costly, inefficient and required that OCAS support hundreds of exceptions.

The Solution

Navantis recommended that OCAS move to a state-of-the-art Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) built on a highly reliable and scalable Microsoft platform. This design would:

Increase visibility for the transcript process;

Provide a single platform for integration across the enterprise;

Enable simple methods for managing communication protocols;

Make it easy to on-board new partners;

Dramatically reduce operating costs.

The Rewards

A savings of approximately 47% over two years, this solution is positioning OCAS to offer many new services to their client base, ensuring they can remain current, innovative and a leader in education services. Some additional benefits include:

A decreased risk from operating unsupported legacy software by replacing with current Microsoft technology;

Reduced call centre volumes as more information is easily available online by all the users – both internal and external;

Improved operational visibility through dashboards and near real-time exchange of data;

Improved ability to manage capacity as more providers of data are on-boarded, the new system can scale rapidly;

Reduced errors and bottlenecks as manual retyping of information is not required;

Ease of on-boarding new partners – they don’t have to change their systems or the way they do business to become part of the OCAS community.

“For us, the strategic value of the new ESB is that it has become the foundation piece for future business strategy and integration with our partners, enabling us to rapidly modernize by plugging-in older applications and adding new workloads.”